How to hang Christmas lights without wrecking your gutters or shingles

Every year somebody puts a staple gun through the drip edge of a perfectly good roof, and every spring somebody else finds out what a screw through an aluminium fascia does after one Ontario winter of water sitting in the hole.

None of it is necessary. Christmas lights do not need to be fixed to a house permanently, and the correct way to hang them is faster than the wrong way. Here is what actually causes damage, what to use instead, and why the strand that comes loose always comes loose in the last week of December.

That picture at the top, by the way, is a mockup rather than a photograph. It is our own place in Midhurst with the lights drawn on, which is the same thing we will build for your house if you put your address in.

The three things that actually damage a roof

It is almost never the lights. It is the fixing method and the ladder.

Staples and brad nails. A staple through a shingle tab makes a hole in the part of the roof whose entire job is being waterproof. It will not leak this winter. It will leak in about four years, once the tab has lifted a little and the sealant strip below it has let go, and by then nobody connects the leak to the lights. The same staple through the fascia leaves a hole that holds water against bare wood or bare aluminium.

Screws and hooks left in year round. People install them once, reasonably, so they never have to do it again. Then the hole freezes and thaws for a decade. On wood fascia you get rot around the screw. On aluminium you get a corroded ring that starts lifting the paint.

The ladder. This is the big one and nobody expects it. Leaning an extension ladder directly against the gutter puts your body weight, plus the ladder's, on a length of aluminium held on by spikes or hangers every few feet. It dents the front lip, and if a hanger lets go the trough drops out of line and never drains properly again. Most of the bent gutters we see in Simcoe County were bent by a ladder, not by ice.

Clips are the whole answer

Everything on a residential roof can be hung on clips. No staples, no nails, no screws, nothing left behind in the spring.

There are three you need to know:

• Shingle tab clips. These slide under the edge of a shingle and hold the bulb facing out. For a roofline where the light should follow the peak or the rake, this is the one.
• Gutter clips. These hook over the lip of the trough. Use these where you have a gutter and you want the run along the eave.
• Ridge or peak clips. For running along a ridge or over the top of a gable, where there is no gutter and no tab edge to grab.

The rule for spacing is roughly one clip every foot on a C9 run, tighter around corners and drops. That sounds like a lot of clips. It is a lot of clips. It is also the difference between a straight line in February and a sagging one.

A detail most people miss: the clip has to actually seat. You should feel it click over the lip or under the tab. A clip that is resting in roughly the right place will hold a strand of lights all through November and let go the first time there is real weight above it.

Why the failures all happen in the last week of December

Here is the sequence, and it is the same every time.

The lights go up in late November or early December, when the roof is already cold and the shingles are stiff. Half the clips do not seat properly because a stiff shingle tab does not want to lift and the person on the ladder is cold and getting on with it. Everything looks perfect from the ground.

Then it snows properly. A gutter that is full of frozen leaves and then loaded with snow is carrying real weight, and it pulls on every clip along it. The ones that never seated let go. A metre of strand drops and hangs down the fascia, and from the road the whole display suddenly looks like nobody cared.

That is why installers start in October. It is not a scheduling preference. A clip seats properly on a dry October roof and fights you on a frozen one, and you cannot tell the difference from the ground until January.

It is also why clearing the gutters first matters more than it sounds. A trough packed with maple leaves freezes into one solid block, and that block is what is pulling on your clips all winter.

Ladder rules, if you are doing it yourself

• Never rest the ladder on the gutter. Use a standoff or stabiliser bar so the load goes onto the fascia or the roof edge, not the trough.
• Set the base one foot out for every four feet of height. On frozen or wet ground, put a board under the feet.
• Do not stretch sideways. Move the ladder. Every serious ladder fall we have heard about locally started with somebody reaching for one more clip rather than climbing down.
• Do not walk the roof in December. A cold asphalt shingle is brittle and a frosted one has no grip at all, and the two things arrive together.

The parts you should not do yourself

Being straight about this: single-storey rooflines, porch posts, railings, shrubs and the trees at ground level are all reasonable jobs for a homeowner with a decent ladder and an afternoon.

Second storey and above is a different thing, and steep pitches are a different thing again. The maths is not complicated. A fall from a second-storey eave is roughly six metres onto frozen ground, and the reason people do it anyway is that the job seems small. The job is small. The consequence is not.

If the display you want needs somebody up above the first storey, it is worth either scaling the design down to what you can safely reach, or having it done.

Take them down in January

Leave a strand up through the summer and the UV goes to work on the insulation, the clips get brittle, and next November you find out which half of your lights survived. January takedown is not fussiness, it is what makes the same set last five seasons instead of two.

If you have used clips as described, takedown is genuinely quick, and there is nothing left on the house. That is the actual test of whether it was done properly: in February, standing in the driveway, you should not be able to tell that anything was ever attached to your roof.

Or hand it over

We install Christmas lights across Simcoe County, and the price covers the lights, the design, the install, coming back if a strand fails mid-season, taking it all down in January and storing it until next winter. No takedown invoice in the new year and no travel charge anywhere in the county.

Everything is clipped. Nothing is stapled, screwed or nailed to your house, and the clips come off with the lights.

• Christmas light installation, including a mockup of your own house before you spend anything
• Midhurst, where the mature pines usually matter more than the roofline
• Springwater Township, where the snow belt decides how tightly everything gets clipped
• Barrie

Booking runs through September and October, and installs go up from late October in the order they were booked. The reason to sort it now is not scarcity, it is that a dry roof in October is a better roof to work on than a frozen one in December.